Bacterial motors carefully studied: Addendum (Introduction)

dhw: You have now told us your God is incapable not only of giving other organisms the intelligence to improve themselves (he is only capable of it with preprogrammed guidance), but he can't even give them the intelligence to want to improve....Out of interest, do you regard the will to survive as natural, or does God have to guide individual organisms to want to survive and then guide them into finding out how to do it?

If you could tell us where God would put 'intelligence' into bacteria, or into animals who only understand danger of injury as prey animals, I would agree. In bacteria I only see automaticity. In animals fear, n ot the ability to plan new species improvements.

DAVID: With all the extremely improbables, and lets add the sudden origin of our fine-tuned universe to the list, I don't see why you can't accept the idea of God running everything. Something is a first cause.

dhw: Once again: your first cause is a sourceless, unknown, unknowable, conscious, single mind that deliberately creates billions of solar systems that come and go for no apparent reason etc. (Do I need to repeat the etc.?) This is so irrational that you yourself have said many times that it requires a gigantic leap of faith - just like the faith needed to believe that the mechanism for life, reproduction and evolution could assemble itself by chance.

Of course, faith requires a leap. Do you ever think positively about not 'how' but 'why' humans exist?